Contrapasso
by elphabathedelirious32
Summary: Musicalverse. He would move heaven and earth to keep them from so much as touching her ever again.Morrible began to see exactly how good the girl must be at her work in the Resistance.
1. Contrapasso

**A/N: So this is a new multichapter fic I'm starting. Probably not the most brilliant idea considering what a load school is, but I've just found out I've been MAJORLY overdoing my Euro notes, and this information should cut that down to about an hour or less, and that'll give me so much more time it's not even funny. Also, _contrapasso _is Italian- it kind of means "counterpunishment," and it's used in conjunction with the punishments for sinners in Dante's _Inferno_- the punishment exactly fits the sin. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

_Prologue: Shiz_

_He watched her, whenever he could. Out of the corner of his eyes, when he was with Glinda and the rest of their shallow group. Tall and stately, more than her skin separated her from them. She was intelligent and she cared, and she was deep and he longed to sink into those depths. But where he was, was _comfortable_, and he couldn't bring himself to change his life. He wanted to know what went on behind those expressive eyes, that furrowed brow, the dark veil of hair. He wanted to know Elphaba inside and out, and it was like a gnawing ache in his heart. He realized with a start that this was what it was to be in love. _

_But he could never tell her, she would never know. He wondered what she would say, if he told her. The funny thing was, he couldn't begin to imagine her reaction. _

_And then came that day. The day with the Lion cub. The day Madame Morrible gave her the letter. Then, after that, the day she left and never came back. The day everything changed, for her, for him, for Glinda. _

_For all of Oz. _

Three Years Later: Gale Force Headquarters, Emerald City

Fiyero had had no idea that he had caught her until he saw her, stripped naked from the waist up and trying desperately not to scream as Besily whipped her, hard.

"What the _hell_ are you doing?" he demanded, storming into the interrogation room, working hard to repress the painful emotions welling up in his chest at the sight of her. Let loose, they could have…embarrassing…difficult…consequences. _Hard _consequences. And besides that, he'd probably fly at Besily and start beating him. So he ignored them, and merely said, "I did _not _authorize this!"

"No, sir, but the Wizard did," said Besily, with a bit of smugness on his face. It was echoed in the faces of Natan and Periat, leaning against the wall and leering in a way that made it _extremely _tempting for Fiyero to just slam their empty heads together and hear the satisfying hollow sound. But he resisted.

Besily hit Elphaba again. She hissed sharply in pain.

"Damnit, you, cry!" Besily demanded of her.

"Is- there- a," she panted, trying to get the words out- "question- there?"

Fiyero smirked slightly.

"I have to agree with her, Besily," he said. "_Is _there? This is an interrogation, is it not? And of course, _extremely _legitimate. _Right_?" Besily sulked.

"I wanna see if it's true," he half-whined. Naten and Periat nodded. Fiyero was about to ask _what_ he wanted to see, but Elphaba answered the question before he could ask it.

"Then why don't you just dump a bucket of water over me, you empty-headed twits?" she asked bitingly, recovering herself somewhat.

"'Cause then you'd be dead, and the Wizard wouldn't like that," Besily replied, and raised the whip to bring down on her again. She winced in anticipation.

"_Wait_," said Fiyero desperately, mind racing, half-formed decisions, ideas, plans, racing around his head. He saw hope flicker in Elphaba's eyes and regretted his next words before they even left his mouth. But she would see, they were necessary. "Is this the best interrogation we can muster up? Really, Besily, with all the facilities at your disposal, a _whipping _is the best you can do for the terror of Oz? Petty criminals have gotten worse!" Besily looked wounded then, the stupid little man, and he opened his mouth to make excuses- _lack of imagination would be the most truthful_, thought Fiyero, but once again Elphaba responded before he could.

"You're- you're with _them_ now, are you, Fiyero?" asked Elphaba.

_Damnit! She shouldn't have done that! Now I'll have to prove himself to the others, so this plan'll work! Now I'll have to hurt her! Shit!_

"Silence, witch!" he yelled at her. Her face twisted and for a moment he could see the heartless terrorist the rest of Oz spoke of so hatefully. But then he looked into her hazel eyes and saw the pain and thwarted hope mingled achingly there, and she was Elphaba Thropp, the lovely, solitary, mocked green girl from college again.

Besily hit her again with the whip, several times over her open wounds in quick succession, and she screamed an unholy, inhuman scream, born of more than excruciating physical pain. Her soul was screaming, too, and he couldn't stand it anymore.

Terrorist or no, she was Elphaba. She was his friend. She was…the woman he had loved unquestioningly and devoted his life to finding for more than three years.

"Stop," he said authoritatively. How could they not know his heart was breaking? How could _she _not read his love for her, tangible as he felt it? "I'll take her somewhere else for questioning. You aren't at all trained for this, Besily, that's obvious enough. I could've gotten all the information I wanted, but now we'll be lucky if she says _anything_." How could they not hear how false his words are whenever he spoke to them? But he was convincing; the three of them at least looked sheepish.

"Yes, sir," they murmured in unison.

"Now, go and find someone to take your statements about the capture, and when you're finished, have the statements brought to me. Go. _Now_."

"Yes, sir," they mumbled collectively, and exited, shuffling and shamefaced.

Elphaba's eyes were cold and fierce.

"So," she said icily, amazingly collected for someone half-naked and in immense pain, bleeding all over the floor, "you know how to 'handle' me, do you?" She gave a mirthless laugh. "I'm glad one of us does."

"I'm not going to hurt you, Elphie," said Fiyero. He used the old nickname accidentally, but he saw her eyes widen and a different emotion creep in. Could it be…hope?

"Then what _are _you going to do?" she asked warily.

"I'm going to get you out of here and dress those wounds. They look nasty," he answered, not moving so as not to make her feel threatened. He still carefully, heartbreakingly, held his wave of emotions in check.

"About as nasty as the audience they drew," she responded, indicating with her head where Naten and Periat had been standing. "At least I have the consolation that I managed to bite the blond one when they captured me, and now he probably thinks he's got a disease."

Fiyero snorted. "They're all three of them assholes," he told her, helping her up and grimacing along with her. "Uh- here," he added awkwardly, grabbing a blanket from a shelf and loosely draping it over her shoulders. She winced but accepted it, clutching it in front of her. He pulled out a pair of handcuffs. "I'm sorry, but they're already suspicious enough," he apologized as he gently put them on her thin green wrists, where they hung loosely enough to make them useless.

"It's not your fault. And…thank you." She looked at him, some of the haziness of pain gone from her eyes. "Why _are _you doing this?" she asked suspiciously. He had forgotten that she didn't know why he was there, that he had only endured this in order to help her.

"Do you know why I became a Gale Forcer?" he asked.

"Sadistic power trips. And what-"

"No. To find you." She looked at him, startled and confused.

"But-"

"To help you," he clarified, and the look of gratefulness and pure _relief _in her eyes nearly brought him to his knees.

…

Back in Fiyero's quarters, he quickly removed her handcuffs.

"Here, lay down."

She did so, gratefully, and once she had he pulled the blanket from her shoulders. He heard her sharp intake of breath and it was like a stab to his heart.

"I'm sorry," he told her.

"S'okay," she murmured, the pain returning to her voice. "Not your fault."

He got a good look at her back for the first time and drew back in shocked horror.

There was no green visible, that was how bad it was. Her entire back was laid open, thick and red, clotted with congealed blood but still bleeding profusely.

"Oh, Elphaba," he murmured, low enough so she didn't hear it. Then, louder, not betraying any of his shock at her state- "I'll get something to put on those."

He rummaged fruitlessly through the medicine cabinet in the bathroom for a good fifteen minutes before he finally found some unguent that he could use on Elphaba's wounds. When he came back into the room, he saw her trying to sit up, pain evident on her face- _but oh, was it wrong for him to want her to stay that way, for him to want to sit down next to her and touch her? But he couldn't, oh the curse of it, he could see but not touch, because he couldn't hurt her. He had her here, and he didn't; what a _contrapasso. _And it was- he had had her there at Shiz and he was too weak, too cowardly, to admit his love_- but now, with her helpless and injured before him, trying so hard just to regain some autonomy, he turned away in embarrassment, though, oh, how he wanted not to. But he would not, could not, hurt her any more than she had already been hurt.

"Lay down," he instructed, "I've got something for your back." Wordlessly, she obeyed, and he could look at her again.

As he sat rubbing the salve into her wounds, trying not to exalt in the touch he knew was painful for her, she finally spoke, with some difficulty.

"You're- you're really not one of them, then?"


	2. Interruption

**A/N: Debate is fun. Wheeeeeeee. Hm. Should I completely greenify myself for Homecoming? I wonder…**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

She was staring at him with such avidness, such intensity, that he was sure she could see through flesh, muscle, bone and any ephemeral barriers straight into his soul. It discomfited and fascinated him, all at once.

"No," he answered her, his heart in his voice. "I'm not. I never was."

She broke then. The relief in her face blew like a cyclone through her veils and shutters and defenses. She took in a deep breath, trying to stop herself from shaking.

Fiyero tried desperately to look away, and not just for the…physical…reasons. He didn't think he could bear the look on her face a moment longer.

They sat like that for a moment; then he felt her touch, light as a butterfly, against his arm.

"I'm going to sleep," she told him. "So that you know."

Well. This was the height of awkwardness.

"I will too," he said, standing up and heading for the couch. He wasn't sure he _would _sleep, anyway. He needed to plan- soon, they would come looking for her. The two of them needed another place. He sat down on the couch and stared at the ceiling.

Before his first thought even began to form, he was dead asleep.

…

He woke up suddenly, and leaned over the top of the couch to see the clock. Seven. Why, why, _why_ was he up so early? He didn't even have to report in today. The light tread of footsteps and the clanging of pots in the miniscule kitchen area, however, gave him his answer.

Elphaba was standing in the kitchen in one of his shirts, loosely done up, and the remainders of her torn black dress. She had his spare amount of pots and other unnamed kitchen paraphernalia spread out on the counter and was regarding his all but empty cabinets in exasperation.

"What are you _doing_?" he asked her.

"Why don't you have any food?" she countered. Fiyero flushed oddly.

"I- I don't usually eat here."

Elphaba turned, her mouth pursed oddly and an eyebrow faintly cocked.

"Oh?" she said in a strange, false voice. "The indomitable Miss Glinda, I presume?" There was a sad look in her eyes he could hardly fathom. _She did care! _

He had all but forgotten about Glinda, in truth. She paled in comparison to Elphaba, and not merely in the obvious physical sense of their skins. Elphaba and everything she did took the full force of Fiyero's attention- of _everyone's _attention. She was- _magnetic_.

"Glinda…doesn't matter," he told her, and he saw something odd flicker in Elphaba's eyes. Triumph- that for once _she _had gotten what she wanted? It gave him a shuddery feeling along his spine.

But then a flutter of insecurity ran through her, and she bit her lip surreptitiously, again reassuring him with the idiosyncrasies of the collegiate nonconformist he had known.

"Really?" she asked.

"Yes," he replied without hesitation. Her eyes locked with his, and in an instant he was haphazardly leaping over the couch and she was tripping over a cacophony of cookware and they were kissing, wrapped up in each other, and that's how they stood when the knock at the door came.

Elphaba and Fiyero looked at each other in shock.

"Who…who is it?" Fiyero called hoarsely, though they already knew the terrible answer.

"It's Besily and the squad, Captain!" someone yelled, and Elphaba clenched her fists. "The green whore escaped!"

_White-hot rage, repressed_.

"Just a minute," called Fiyero in the same hoarse tone, gesturing silently towards the bed. "I'm, uh, not decent."

Elphaba, understanding instantly, dove completely under the covers as Fiyero whipped off his shirt and messed with his hair.

"Come in," he called, positioning himself awkwardly near the bed. Elphaba made breathy, just woken up noises from under the blankets as the men filed in, smothering laughter.

"Fiyero?" she asked in her best approximation of Glinda. All the men- especially Besily, Naten, and Periat- laughed and made vulgar congratulatory remarks to Fiyero.

"Great. You can see the green girl's not here. I took her back to her cell last night and after that I can't tell you. Now," he looked at them aggrievedly, "can you _please go_?"

"Just a minute," said Besily, leering. "We've got to take a peek under the blankets."

A loud chorus of hoots went up and Elphaba gave a not entirely faked shriek of alarm.

"Don't you DARE! Fi-yeeer-o!"

"Get the _hell _out, Besily!" yelled Fiyero. "I mean it, all of you! Seriously! Go search for the witch and I'll join you once I get my boxers back, okay?"

More hooting and laughter predictably ensued, but the squadron obeyed and dissipated out the door, rowdily continuing their search.

Elphaba's dark head emerged from beneath the covers, her face stained red beneath the green with suppressed laughter and the giddiness of a narrow escape. Her eyes sparkled in a way that Fiyero hadn't seen in too, too long. She pulled herself fully from the cocoon of blankets and the moment she got to her feet, Fiyero enveloped her in his arms and pressed his face into her hair. _Wood smoke and forest_.

"Don't," she laughed, "I need to wash."

"Oh, you do?" he asked with undisguised interest.

"I'm _not _allergic to water. You _should _have known that," she said forcefully. "I'm pretty sure it's physically impossible."

He gave her a pointed look, and she sighed. "_Fine_. But even though I'm not, it may still hurt, because of my back."

"Perverted assholes," muttered Fiyero. "I'd like to…" he trailed off when Elphaba touched his arm again.

"We'd _both_ like to," she said sensibly, "but first I need to wash and disguise myself and- we- need to find somewhere safe."

He felt a jolt of elation thrill through him at the _we_- he won't have to force her to let him come, too, then.

She moved toward the bathroom, smiling over her shoulder, with ethereal grace, and finally he managed to tear his eyes away from the door she had disappeared into and sit down to plan.


	3. Strategy

**A/N: Okay. I messed this up, so I had to rewrite it. Here goes. Also, my own cold is almost gone, and I have no intention of jinxing that, so no literary voodoo this time. : )**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

Instead of a shower, Elphaba decided to take a bath- bite the bullet, as it were, and completely submerge her injured back. She filled the tub with steaming water, pulled out Fiyero's only slightly surprisingly extensive collection of soaps and shampoos, and, blushing slightly as she did so, because she could hear Fiyero moving about in the other room, removed his slightly bloodied shirt and the tattered remains of her skirt. She loosened her hair from its disheveled chignon and let it fall over her shoulders, grimacing slightly as the light weight of it swung against her back. She looked at the water and soap in dismay, feeling almost as if she _were_ allergic to the damn stuff.

_This is not going to be pleasant, _she thought grimly, and slowly slipped into the water, nearly crying out as she sat down and it lapped against her back. With every movement accompanied by a wince, she slowly washed herself, beginning with her back. Pain sang through every nerve as soap touched raw, lacerated flesh, and she half-convulsed with it, using every ounce of her training to keep herself from screaming and to force herself to push onwards to cover the whole back and then slip beneath the water. Small swirls of red spun out around her, twirling upward and dissipating in small spinning galaxies of blood on the surface of the water.

She methodically washed the rest of herself and her hair, biting her lip in pain when the shampoo ran in sudsy trails down the open wounds of her back. Finally, she finished and she pulled herself laboriously, reluctantly, out of the water that her injuries had finally accepted. She toweled herself off, the pain of the cloth rubbing into her wounds adding to the throbbing pulse that was her autonomous, living, agony. Finally, biting her lip to keep from crying out, she wrapped a torn piece of sheet around her torso as a bandage, and looked at herself in the mirror. A heated rose had climbed to just beneath the surface of her skin, giving it an odd duality of color. She slid the water-lacquered ebony of her hair through bony elegant fingers, trying in vain to prevent the thick locks from tangling. Her mind felt thick and heavy in the heat of the small bathroom, and she tried hard to clear her head, unconsciously letting out a few notes of song when she finally succeeded.

"Almost done in there, my nightingale?" came Fiyero's voice from outside the door, making her flush even deeper. But she more than liked having him call her so; the memory of their brief kiss haunted her. And so did something else, she realized, when she took a step and pain shot up from the soles of her feet. With the additional injuries to her back and their overwhelming pain, she hadn't noticed that her feet still hurt. She pushed it out of her mind.

"Elphaba?" Fiyero knocked at the door once more, concern invading his inflection. "Are you sure you're all right? You haven't melted?"

"Rather a pointless question," Elphaba rejoined, finding her voice, "for if I had, I'd hardly be able to answer you." She heard Fiyero laugh with relief.

"Conceded," he said. She searched through the jumble of what appeared to be just-washed clothes on the bathroom counter. She pulled on her underclothes, another of Fiyero's shirts, and a pair of his pants that she tied with a length of twine around her waist (why he in this bit of deus ex machina happened to have twine in his bathroom, she did not care to know)

A tub full of hot water and a room full of moist, humid air; who in Oz would have thought such a place would begin to heal the Witch, rather than painfully torture her to a death of "natural causes." Still laughing lightly at the irony, she walked out of the bathroom door into the main room. As the cold air hit her pleasantly and her feet hit the hard wood decidedly _un_pleasantly, she made a noticeable face, and Fiyero, clearly more observant than he liked to pretend, could apparently guess that it wasn't from her back.

"What's wrong, Elphie?" he asked kindly, motioning for her to sit next to him on the couch. She did so.

"I just hurt my feet, that's all," she said quickly. Before she could move away, he reached out and grabbed one of her feet, turning her to face him on the couch, and examined it.

"The soles of your feet are _burned_," he said, horrified. "Did my men do this, too?"

"No-"

"The Wizard?"

"_No-_"

"Then _who_?"

"The Resistance," she murmured quietly, her hair swinging in front of her face.

"The…" he could hardly believe what he was hearing. "What…why? Did you…did you do something?"

"No, you naïve boy," she said, her head jerking up sharply and revealing a shield of haughtiness over her eyes. "It's for endurance. For pain…of torture…" she trailed off, sorry for her harshness a moment earlier. "I mean…it's nothing." She looked him in the eyes again. "Can I have my foot back, please?"

He realized with a rush of embarrassment that he was still holding her by the ankle. He examined the sole of her long, narrow foot again, wondering how she could consider that 'nothing.'

"We need a plan," she said abruptly, yanking her leg towards her with such strength that he nearly flew head first over the other arm of the couch.

"Well," said Fiyero, "my family actually has a place, here in the city. My parents never use it anymore, though- they say it's too depressing since the Wizard's reign."

Elphaba grinned. "I think I like your parents," she remarked.

"That's only because you haven't met them," he responded with equanimity. "They're not so magnanimous or radical as you're thinking. They're merely ineffectually and silently protesting the fact that the Wizard's taxation policies inconvenience them."

"I've never met them, so I'll take your word for it," Elphaba said. "Can we go there? Can you…leave here?"

"I'll quit today," Fiyero vowed fiercely.

"No! No, don't," Elphaba protested urgently. "That would be incredibly suspicious- the Witch disappears, your apartment is the only place that doesn't get fully searched and the next day you leave? No. And besides, if you keep working here but say you want to move because you're tired of hearing every detail of your men's lives _through the walls_, we'll know what they're planning and we'll be one step ahead of them."

Fiyero was slightly abashed at the fact that he hadn't thought of it.

"Good plan," he said. "I'll go announce that I'm moving out, you start packing, okay?"

"I can have us out of here in an hour," Elphaba responded, already up and moving about.

Fiyero exited the room, anticipation coursing through him. How funny, he thought. He, _he, _Fiyero Tiggular, the _paragon _of pleasure, had forgotten what it was like to feel anything other than completely tense.


	4. Resistance

**A/N: And I totally thought I'd already posted this…not to mention typed it. Whoops. Keep in mind that this resistance is not the seemingly omnipotent and highly aloof organization that it is in the book. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. Don't sue me. **

Within the day, Elphaba and Fiyero had moved into his parents' apartment.

"You know," said Elphaba thoughtfully, perched on the arm of the couch, legs in an awkward tangle- Fiyero had noticed she rarely sat still unless she was either in some odd position or reading something- "this seems way too lucky to be true."

"Well," said Fiyero quietly, "that seems to be the pattern of my life, but you're right, it _is _odd that they've maintained this apartment all this time-"

Just as he finished, a complex series of knocks came at the door. Fiyero leapt up and an expression of horror came over Elphaba's face.

"Fiyero, no-" she began, but it was too late. He had already opened the door and a coterie of cloaked beings stared in horror at the man in the Gale Force uniform standing in the doorway.

"What the hell?" someone said. Elphaba heard the sound of sword slipping from sheath and veritably flew across the room and between Fiyero and the leader of the cloaked group.

"Fae?" one of them asked. "Have you betrayed-"

"_No_!" She didn't let him finish. "He's _good_. He's on our side. He joined the Gale Force to look for me, to _help_ me."

"Isn't he Glinda the Good's fiancé?" one of the cloaked figures asked. Fiyero rolled his eyes.

"I never _asked _her to marry me!" he protested.

"Another example of the power of propaganda," remarked Elphaba. "If you're told something often enough, even if it's you telling yourself, you'll begin to believe it."

Fiyero noticed that she was more graceful, more still, and less forthcoming now that the others, members of her Resistance, he could only assume, were here.

"Now, everyone, _get_ inside. Who can define 'inconspicuous' for me? That's what I thought," said Elphaba, surprisingly sarcastic towards the people Fiyero guessed had done such harm to her feet.

Once the group had come in and Fiyero had changed out of his Gale Force uniform (the dark glances he was getting were discomfiting when he considered that they came from people that not only had swords, knives, and other sharp objects concealed on their bodies, but whom, judging by Elphaba, could also probably kill him a dozen different ways _without _the benefit of said sharp objects), Elphaba turned to face her comrades-in-arms.

"What in Oz are you doing here?" she demanded.

"It's one of our other meeting places, Fae," the leader replied. "The owners have granted us full use of it." Fiyero gasped at this revelation, but Elphaba kept her cool. Fiyero admired her unflinching, icy, calm.

"Fi-" Elphaba began, but caught herself. "Your…" she left the word _parents_ unspoken, but he knew what she meant.

"I didn't know!" he exclaimed.

"Inconvenient taxation, hm?" she asked, laughing.

"I'm sorry that they act like tight-fisted jerks and I couldn't see through it," Fiyero answered, pretending to be hurt. All the others appeared as confused as he felt. Suddenly, Elphaba whirled on them.

"Why didn't I know about this meeting place?" she demanded abruptly. Fiyero watched what appeared to be the leaders of the Resistance squirm, however slightly, under the intensity of her gaze. "So," Elphaba murmured quietly, "so much for 'a singular institution of and for complete equality', then, hmm?"

She used such a voice for the phrase that Fiyero could tell instantly that she was quoting, and viciously so. The leaders were abashed now, if hiding it. She had shamed them, but they weren't going to show her; however, Fiyero knew that if he had noticed it, she had as well. She made a disgusted noise and turned on her heel, storming into the kitchen and slamming the door behind her.

"Uh…make yourselves at home," said Fiyero, fleeing into the kitchen after Elphaba.

…

"Men," she was saying, rattling purposelessly through drawers. "All men. No offense, Fiyero. It's because I'm a woman, isn't it?" she asked, as if he were privy to the inner workings of her organization, as she paced the kitchen back and forth. "They don't think I'm strong enough. I haven't proven myself yet? I didn't flinch when they burned the soles of my feet, I said nothing under Gale Force torture- again, no offense- I complete every assignment, what more do they want from me?" she ranted, slamming shut the cabinets with a loud _bang_.

"I…don't…know?" he offered. She turned to glare.

"That was helpful."

"Sorry."

"It's not your fault, it's theirs. Misogynist-" she was about to curse, but noting the volume of her voice, she thought better of it. "Their inner circle. There's no Animals, Fiyero. No Animals, no women, no one but human men." She hit the cabinet door for good measure. "I hate men."

"Uh…is there anyone else you could maybe have this conversation with?" Fiyero asked pointlessly, knowing that there obviously was not.

"That would defeat the point of going into hiding, wouldn't it?" she said. She sighed. "I'm sorry, Yero. You know I don't mean you. Oh, Oz, I never thought I'd say this, but I need-"

She was cut off by a cursory knock on the door, the sound of a key turning, the door swinging on its hinges, and a high, sing-song voice.

"Fiiiiyeeeerooo- oh! Sweet Oz! Fiyero, who…"

"Glinda," we sighed in unison.


	5. Can't

**A/N: Short and long delayed, and also not mine, but here it is nonetheless. **

"Fiyero?"

"Glinda?"

"_Elphaba_?"

"Fae?"

This last was from the quite confused leader of the Resistance. "Who is this? Is that Glinda the Good? What the hell is going on here?"

"Nothing! I- nothing. We'll be in the kitchen."

Elphaba grabbed Glinda and Fiyero each by an arm and yanked them into through the doors.

"Elphie Elphie Elphie Elphie!" Glinda squealed, hugging her friend and jumping up and down, causing Elphaba to nearly fall.

"Hi, Glinda," she managed.

"What are you doing here?" Fiyero asked her. "How did you know to come-"

"I went to the garrison, and they told me you'd moved, and where." She pouted. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I moved in about three hours ago."

"Oh."

Elphaba and Fiyero gave each other an awkward look.

"Glinda-" they both began simultaneously. Fiyero looked at Elphaba again. _Go_, his eyes told her_, I'll deal with this_. She said a silent thank you and exited, back into the living room, to deal with the other half of her life. That suddenly, it had become divided, instead of singular; she had two parts of her life, immutably separate, instead of a single, consuming drive. With a startling immediacy, Fiyero had become half of her world, and she wondered vaguely if that wasn't dangerous. She felt herself careening out of control, spinning suddenly out of the careful, tight web she had woven, bursting half-reluctantly from her cocoon. Her heart, her life, were no longer solely in her hands, and it scared her to death. But she kept walking, and when she emerged into the other room, she spoke, somehow. She didn't lose her temper, she didn't even continue arguing. She just…_was_, knowing that half of her world was hanging in precarious balance in the other room.

…

"Glinda," Fiyero said slowly, pacing the few feet between counter and wall, "I have something to say."

"What? Did you want to pick out the ring for me yourself? Because I thought maybe-"

"No, it's not about the ring."

"It's not?"

"Well- kind of- no…but yes," Fiyero stuttered. "I mean, not the ring. The engagement."

"Were you mad? Did you want to ask me yourself? I thought you might, but Madame Morrible said the optimum effect-"

"No! I didn't want to ask you myself! I didn't want to ask you!"

Glinda took a moment to process this. "Do you mean to say that-"

"Yes! Glinda, you're wonderful, but I don't love you. I can't marry you. It wouldn't be fair." His voice had gone from panic to reassuring calm all in the space of a few seconds.

"And this is supposed to be fair?!" she cried, decorum deteriorating quickly.

"I know, it's wrong of me to do this now, to have waited, but I have to! I can't marry you, Glinda!"

"Why not?"

"Because I don't love you!" his voice softened. "I…can't love you."

"Why?"

"Because I love someone else."

"Someone els-" realization hit her. "Elphaba. You love Elphaba?"

"Yes."

Her face hardened. "Fine." She stormed out through the double doors, and he could hear Elphaba in the other room cry out her name as she walked past, but there was no response other than the resounding, irrevocable slam of the front door.


	6. Perfect Honesty

Elphaba, with her inherent authority, had managed to clear the flat of miscellaneous insurrectionists, and so the pair sat, waiting for something to happen. Elphaba had discovered Fiyero's father's library and now was sitting, her back draped over the arm of a chair and her ankles crossed, resting against the place on the chair where her head should have been, immersed in a book. The delicacy of her position coupled with the injuries to her back, which hovered a few precarious centimeters above the surface of the chair, forced her into stillness and calm.

Fiyero, on the other hand, found himself rising to pace every ten minutes or so, until, finally, just after nightfall, Elphaba extricated herself from her book, and, in a lithe and acrobatic movement, folded herself chest to knees and leapt from the chair, setting her book on a coffee table and sitting down beside him. He glanced at her.

"How are you so calm?"

She laughed.

"I'm not." She looked at him with her piercing hazel gaze. "What are you worried about, Fiyero?"

He felt pinned, but pleasantly, by her gaze; a willing captive.

"I-" he didn't quite know how to express it, but he tried anyway. "The Gale Force. You, getting caught. You and Glinda- you two shouldn't hate each other."

"_I _don't hate _her_," Elphaba corrected, and stared at him. "And to think, you called yourself self-absorbed."

He looked down for a moment, and when he looked up he found that she was smiling, laughing slightly. When his eyes met hers, her face broke into a grin, and he found himself amazed by the innocent, unselfconscious beauty of her smile, shocking from one usually so reserved and aloof.

She was all the more beautiful for not recognizing the beauty she possessed, the polar opposite of Glinda.

"And you, Elphaba?" he asked, "What are you worried about?" It was as if a spell had descended upon them both, ensconced in their little world, a small, brightly lit haven in the darkness, ensuring perfect honesty from two accustomed to disguising their thoughts.

"Endangering you," she answered, biting her lip reflexively, "You changing your mind. Deciding Glinda is more beautiful, better- less of a hazard to yourself. Just…easier."

"No one I have ever met is a better person than you, Elphie-Fae. And she is _not _more beautiful. No," he silenced her protest with a finger to her lips, the unexpected touch quieting her, "No. Didn't anyone ever teach you how to take a compliment?" He pulled her closer. "And easier? Miss Glinda, my dear, is anything but _easy _to deal with."

She laughed and leaned into him, to his delight. Never before had a woman so entranced him, enchanted him, _possessed _him. Made him chase her. Changed him irrevocably for the better.

To tell the truth, never before had anyone, other than his father, yelled at him the way she had that day with the Lion cub, and certainly never a girl his own age. And realizing that to her, he wasn't a prince, he was just Fiyero and if he screwed up she certainly wasn't going to spare him- had been the most wonderful thing ever to happen to him. That was, until now.

They were careful. He was delicate in the extreme; not to hurt her. The faintest touch along the lines marring her back, an exploratory touch, as if to heal.

And he was careful more conventionally, too, as it did not seem like her to have done this before- she, who never gave anything of herself, even a smile, unless it was earned, or prised from her. (He was right, as it turned out, and in a strange vague moment he wondered if his parents would ever find the blood on the sheets.)


	7. A Night Out

The pair hadn't waited in vain. Happen something did, and while it was far from the worst thing that could have happened, considering their respective positions and identities, it wasn't the _best _thing that could have happened, either.

Fiyero and Elphaba had finally managed to go out together, at Fiyero's rather belligerent insistence. With a grumbling Elphaba swathed in scarves, they sat down to dinner in a restaurant Fiyero had gone to many times before.

"Going out for no reason, risking _death_ for both of us, Fiyero, is-"

"What's the point of life if you never have any fun?" he asked, grinning brightly and reminding Elphaba of the boy he had been at Shiz.

"_Fun _isn't worth _dying _for," Elphaba said hotly. Fiyero laid his hand over hers.

"Elphie," he said, "it's all right. You don't have to attach deep meaning to everything, you know. It's all right to just _be _sometimes."

"Not all the time," she said, unwilling to relinquish her point.

"No," he agreed, "but sometimes, it's necessary to let go of everything and have fun." She sighed deeply.

"Fine."

"_Fiyero!_" came a boisterous shout from across the restaurant. Fiyero plastered a false smile on his face.

"Shit," he muttered through gritted teeth. "It's Avaric."

"Well, Mr. Dancing-through-life, what are you going to do now?"

"Run for it?"

"Not going to work. He's fast approaching, there's no escaping now." He chanced a glance at Elphaba's eyes, which were concerned behind a veil of amusement. "Shall I go to the restroom, or have you conjured up a suitable explanation?"

"No, no, stay…I have to explain either way. If you stand, he'll know you aren't Glinda anyway."

"I'm not going to help you with this one, if that's what you think."

He sighed. "I know."

Avaric, without awaiting an invitation, sat himself down beside Fiyero.

"Well, well," he said, cutting his eyes at Elphaba in an attempt to be surreptitious, "I haven't seen you in ages, Fiyero!"

"I went out to the bar with you _two days ago_, Av," Fiyero responded. Avaric furrowed his blonde brows.

"Well. I guess you did. I just must've gotten too smashed to remember…"

Elphaba muffled a laugh behind her gloved hand. Avaric looked at her again.

"Who is this, Fiyero? Where's the lovely Glinda?"

"Glinda and I aren't…together anymore, Av."

"Well, I can promise to have gathered that. But still. Who is this?"

Behind her scarf, Fiyero could see Elphaba bite her lip and raise her eyebrows in amusement.

"This is…" Fiyero groped for a name, any name. "Fa…ba. Faba."

One eyebrow went up, the other down. _That's the best you can do_? Elphaba's eyes asked. Aloud, she said, "Pleased to meet you. Sir." The last was a bit too sarcastic for Fiyero's comfort. And she accused him of taking too much risk, just for pleasure?

"Avaric," Avaric said. He extended his hand, and Elphaba shook it. Avaric winced at her grip but tried not to show it. "Your name is…familiar, Miss Faba."

"Is it? I've never heard it before, myself. Apparently it's an old family name," Elphaba said, giving Fiyero a sideways look. Clearly, she was in her element, making every word a subtle satire and inventing double entendres. "My great great grandparents were bean growers."

"Fascinating," said Avaric, clearly bored. He grabbed a beer from the tray of a passing server and took a swig. "May I ask why you are covered so?"

"Oh," Elphaba gave an embarrassed, false, laugh. "It's so humiliating, really. I'm so forgetful. I went to visit a friend of mine at her summerhouse yesterday, and I fell asleep in the sun. It's quite dreadful-looking, really, my sunburn. I'm too embarrassed to let anyone see."

"Oh, now, it can't be that bad," said Avaric. He reached out as if to pull back Elphaba's veil. "Let me-"

"No!" she stood, knocking over her chair. "I- really- couldn't-"

"Leave her alone, Av," Fiyero said worriedly as Elphaba picked up her chair and took her seat gingerly, as if she might have to get up and tear out the door at any moment.

"Something weird's going on here," Avaric stated, pointing at the two of them, "and I want to know what it is."

"Nothing weird is going on here except for the way you're acting," Fiyero said severely, suppressing the tremble in his voice. "Really, Av, you can't just undress people in public. I know you may be accustomed to it considering the places _you _frequent, but the rest of civilized society doesn't tend to take it so kindly."

"Well, civilized society, _you _know," Avaric said dismissively, "not that we live in one. Animals running about like people, green terrorists blowing things up."

Fiyero glanced nervously at Elphaba, who was gripping the table hard, her face beneath its coverings taut with self-restraint, eyes narrowed. "Isn't that _right_, Miss Faba," said Avaric provocatively. As if he knew.

"I – can't expect to have an opinion on such things," Elphaba managed to spit out from between her tight-pressed lips.

"Really? Because I do believe I've just remembered where it was I've heard that name of yours before. A Miss Elphaba, from Shiz, who turned out to be quite wicked. In fact, _she _is that _terrorist_ I was talking about, and she _always _had an opinion." Avaric's voice had gotten low, almost threatening. Elphaba met his gaze coolly. "Really? How novel. Of course, the name 'Elphaba' has an entirely different origin, you know, but what a coincidence."

"Why don't you take off your veil? There were quite a few clouds out yesterday. Any sunburn you _did _get can't be that bad."

"Yes, it can, and I'm afraid I can't oblige your request. Fiyero, I would like to go home now. I am quite tired," Elphaba said imperiously, stalking out the door ahead of him. Glancing over his shoulder as he left, Fiyero met Avaric's smirking gaze as he watched them go.

…

Elphaba kept silent until they were inside the door of the flat, when she burst forth in a torrent of indignance.

"How could you, Fiyero? Oh, I knew we shouldn't have gone out. Does he know you've moved. Does _anyone_? Will the Gale Force tell him? They told Glinda. We've got to get out of here, he's going to tell them his suspicions for certain, and they'll be here within minutes-"

Several sharp raps came at the door.

"See?" Elphaba yelled. "We're finished now. Unless- how many of them do you think they've sent? Five, six, we can probably fight-"

The door opened. Elphaba flung her ever-present satchel at it, and a muttered "oof" came from the hallway.

"Fiyero," said the voice of an older man, "Fiyero, what the hell is going on in there?"

"_Father_?" Fiyero gasped.


	8. So That's It

Elphaba's hand flew to her mouth.

"Oops."

"Fiyero, what in Oz is going on in here?" his mother's voice carried as she struggled over the threshold with her bags. Then she spotted the green woman standing stunned in the living room.

"Oh. My." she said.

"Give it up, Mum, we know what you use the apartment for," Fiyero informed her casually. His father, bent under the weight on a single enormous piece of luggage, finally managed to fit its bulk through the door.

_"What _do we use the apartment for?"

He, too, noticed Elphaba, and the huge bag went crashing to the floor.

"I'm sorry about that satchel. I thought you were the Gale Force," she said. He ignored her, instead addressing his son.

"Fiyero," he asked in a quavering on the edge of rage, bewildered sort of way, "why is a terrorist standing in the living room?"

"Father- I thought you-"

"You thought we what?"

Elphaba saw that the situation was careening closer and closer to becoming even more disastrous than it already was.

"Fiyero. Clearly, we were mistaken," she said, lifting her eyebrows in a way that very clearly told him to _drop it_. Fiyero's father glared at her. His mother gave them both an unreadable look and then fixed her gaze firmly on the wall. _Oh, so _that's_ it,_ Elphaba thought, deciphering the situation easily.

"Um," began Fiyero, flustered now that his perceptions had been proven infinitely skewed and his world had tilted for- what was it, the third time in one week? "Mother, Father, this is Elphaba Thropp. She went to Shiz with me."

"Fiyero. We may not live in a fashionable district of Gillikin, but that doesn't mean we're complete fools," said his father. "We do read broadsides."

"Don't believe everything you read," said Fiyero with a cocky grin. "Besides, I didn't think the Vinkus was ever any too enamored of City leadership, anyway."

"So you _did _pay attention in history class," Elphaba muttered under her breath.

"Well…that may be true…to an extent…but _Fiyero_, she's a _wicked witch_!" exclaimed his father.

"If he says she isn't what they say, I believe him," Fiyero's mother stated, smiling at Elphaba. "Don't you trust Fiyero's judgment?"

"No."

"Father, come on, I'm not an idiot. I'm Captain of the Gale Force, I don't just take up with alleged terrorists for the hell of it!"

"You do everything else for the hell of it!" the older man shot back. Fiyero's face fell, his posture drooped, his tone became more petulant, less confident. He grew more childlike before their very eyes.

"Not anymore," he muttered. "You never believe me when I say I've _changed_. What else do I have to do to prove it?" He straightened again, set his jaw defiantly. "You know what? I don't care." He wrapped his arm around Elphaba. "I love her. And I don't give a damn what you think. Just know this: _If you tell anyone_," he whispered menacingly, "You will never see me again."

His father's jaw dropped in astonishment. A small smile crossed Fiyero's mother's face for a brief moment.

"Well. Let's all just go to bed, I'm sure we're all very tired." She touched her husband's arm gently. "Dear. We'll discuss it in the morning, all right?" She glanced over at her son. "Fiyero, can I speak to you in a moment?"

"Uh, sure," Fiyero said hesitantly. The woman took her husband's arm and led him into the larger of the two bedrooms. Just a few short minutes later, she came quietly back into the room.

"I should-" Elphaba said, making as if to go into the other room.

"No, stay- Elphaba, is it? I'd like to talk to you both."

"Oh. All right then." The younger woman sat slowly down at the kitchen table beside a slightly dazed Fiyero.

"You weren't wrong, dear," his mother said, laying her hand over his. "It wasn't your father who allowed the group access, though, it was just me. Surprisingly, I can be somewhat less conflicted and apathetic in my personal beliefs than he." Fiyero's mouth opened and closed silently, in shock. Elphaba hid a smile.

"Well, he _is _the king. He can't go around telling people he hates the Wizard and supporting terrorist organizations, you know."

Fiyero gaped.

His mother smiled and stood. "Good night, dears," she said, heading into the other room and leaving her son stunned and Elphaba suppressing laughter at his shock.


	9. Conversation

Morning comes relentlessly, insinuating its rosy golden fingers through the curtains and into Fiyero's eyelids. He pounds the pillow in frustration for a moment before automatically reaching out for Elphaba.

Who is not there.

With his damned father all riled up and Avaric out there knowing _things _and doing Lurlina-knows-what, he panicked for a moment, shooting up out of bed in nothing but his underwear and darting about the room like an ecstatic dog confused by a scent for a moment, before he noticed an amused Elphaba leaning against the doorframe grinning at him.

"That was cruel."

"That wasn't intentional. How was I to know you'd react like a two year old whose mother has disappeared?"

He lifted his own eyebrow, the reply jumping to his lips without forethought.

"Nice of _you _to say."

She didn't lose her smirk, but her eyes went cold and hurt.

"_That _was cruel."

"It was. I'm sorry." He tried to lighten things. "I've been around you too long."

She pushed past him and began making the bed, needing something to occupy her anxious hands.

"I'm not _cruel_, Fiyero."

He went on the other side of the bed to help her. She yanked hard on the blankets, too hard. "I'm _not_."

"I know you aren't." She gave him a steely look.

"Liar."

"What?"

"You don't know anything about me."

"Elphaba, I-"

"No. Stop it. You don't."

"I know a weakness of yours, don't I?"

"Shut the hell up. Glinda told you that. She knows me. Not well, but better than you do. That doesn't count."

"I _know _you know you."

She couldn't help but smile.

"You're such a stupid male."

"Stupid?"

"Yes, stupid."

"But I thought you said I wasn't?"

"Not _really _stupid, I said."

He threw a pillow at her. Her hazel eyes widened in shock before she clambered on the bed and began to beat him over the head with his own missile. He grabbed another and began hitting her about the waist and then the knees, trying to get her to fall down to his own level. At last, he succeeded, and he had abandoned his pillow and was bent over the bed kissing her, her fluffy weapon still dangling from her hand, when his parents walked in.

Fiyero pulled away and Elphaba stood up instantly, pulling at her skirts. Fiyero's father glared again, his mother appeared to be stifling a laugh.

"We came to get you for breakfast," his father said stonily.

"And to talk, dears, don't forget that," his mother added.

"As if I would," Fiyero muttered darkly.

"I haven't changed my mind," he announced as soon as they were seated at the table. "I love Elphaba. Accept it or you'll never see or hear from me again."

"I won't be given an ultimatum by my son," said Fiyero's father pompously.

"Now. Both of you," Fiyero's mother looked pleadingly from her husband to her son. "I'm sure he didn't mean it like that."

"Yes, I did," Fiyero muttered almost inaudibly. Elphaba kicked him under the table.

"And you, darling," Fiyero's mother continued, addressing the older man, "you needn't be so harsh. Fiyero has a reasonable request, after all. You had no objection to his relationship with that- was it Galinda or Glinda, dear? I never could get it straight."

Fiyero and Elphaba looked at each other, suppressing laughter.

"Glinda, now," Elphaba supplied at last. Fiyero's mother let the oblique "now" pass.

Fiyero's father harrumphed. "That Glinda girl was an attaché to the Press Secretary. Not a terrorist. And she wasn't-" he caught himself just in time.

"Green?" Fiyero put in, seeing an advantage to press. "You're going to discriminate against my girlfriends by virtue of skin color now, are you, Father?"

"Well, of course not! I never said that."

"You were going to."

"You can't prove that."

"This isn't a law court. I don't need to."

"Not that you need to in a law court anyway," Elphaba couldn't resist putting in _sotto voce_. Fiyero's father heard anyway.

"I wouldn't go _that _far," he said, but Fiyero and his mother both recognized the signs that he was warming to the topic- and to its initiator. "But this government _does _take its power a bit far."

"A bit? It's a dictatorship."

"No, we've still got the Hall of Approval."

Elphaba snorted. "And it quite lives up to its name, _approving _in glowing terms everything Our _Glorious_ Wizard does."

Fiyero's father gave a genuine laugh, and grinned at his wife.

"I like her," he announced, as if the girl in question and Fiyero were not sitting right at the table with them.

"I'm glad to hear it," said Elphaba. "It's a rare enough sentiment."


	10. Found and Lost

**A/N: Sorry! To quote Deb Caletti's **_**The Nature of Jade**_**, "I'm beginning to think that AP stands for 'addicted to pain.'" **

**Disclaimer: Not mine**

With the issue of Elphaba resolved and no prospect of a relaxing vacation with the young lovers on the premises, Fiyero's parents departed, much to their son's relief.

"Thank Lurlina," said Fiyero, "I was about to _kill _them."

"That's my department," said Elphaba, but her eyes were sad.

"Your mother's death wasn't your fault."

"Who the hell says that's what I was referring to?"

"Linguistics. _Them _referred to my parents, and _that_ referred to killing parents."

"_Your _parents, if you're going to be that technical."

"Oh."

"That seems to be how a lot of our arguments end, doesn't it?" Elphaba asked merrily, grabbing an apple from the kitchen counter and biting into it.

"But now," said Fiyero, ignoring her jibe, "we have the house to ourselves."

"How old are we, fifteen?"

"Like you'd even _talked _to a male when you were fifteen."

"As a matter of fact, I did. Often."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. I swore at quite a few of them daily." She bit into the apple again, chewed, swallowed. "I never actually conversed with them because I realized how utterly immature and idiotic they were." She cocked her head and looked at him sideways. "They haven't much changed."

"Oh, _that's _nice."

"I said _they_. Did I know you when I was fifteen?"

"Why, Miss Elphaba, is that an extremely heavily veiled compliment?"

She smiled. "I believe it is."

He kissed her softly. She tasted of apples and coffee, of herbs and the outdoors, autumn and spring.

Their dance, a waltzing ballet passionately interwoven, led them back to the bedroom and under the cool linen sheets, the white light of day filtering through the sheer curtains and onto their skin in speckled patches.

Elphaba slept beside him for an hour before her natural need for productiveness awoke her. She kissed his hair and slipped out of bed and into her loose black dress, snatching her book from the bedside table and wandering into the kitchen.

She was reaching for the coffee grinder when she heard too many footsteps echoing too loudly in the hallway, and a familiar voice giving low orders outside the door. Cold, sour adrenaline spurted into her system, and she sprinted back to the bedroom and shook Fiyero awake.

"Enh…Elphie…whaddya want?"

"_Get _up, you idiot, the _Gale Force _is in the _hallway_!"

"_What?_"

"Your _men _are in the _hallway _outside the door ready to burst in and imprison us!"

"_Fuck_." He sat up and began pulling on his undergarments. He reached for his shirt and Elphaba heard the lock on the front door splinter.

"No time. Get under the blankets." She threw the two blankets lying on the floor over him, making it appear as if he were part of a large pile of cloth, and nothing more.

Her eyes roved over the room. She couldn't hide in the closet, that was idiotic. But they were already in the kitchen…

The space between the bottom of the bed and the floor was miniscule. The bedframe obscured most of it, and the sheets hid the rest. She dove underneath, wriggling slightly to get her hips through, curled into a ball, and lay still, her breath caught in her throat.

_Avaric. Damn him, damn him to hell a thousand times over_.

He had betrayed them. He had betrayed his friend, for what? It wasn't for money, he had more than even someone so careless as he could not waste it all. He had done it because he could, because it amused him. He was the worst kind of asshole.

The footsteps grew closer.

"I don't see anyone, Ma'am," said a young man's voice. _Ma'am? No- no, it can't-_

"They have to be in here somewhere, Setian. Search the closets."

It _was _her. She heard Fiyero's slight intake of breath above her. It was Madame Morrible, out for Elphaba's blood. Her footsteps were measured, calm, as she took in the room. Her heels clicked inches from Elphaba's curled up body.

Elphaba was sure the older woman would hear her heart. Her panicked thoughts. The blood flowing rapidly through her veins.

"There's no one in there."

"Hmm." Her footsteps came to an ominous halt not six inches from Elphaba's head. Elphaba held her breath, willed Fiyero not to make a sound.

But as careful as she was, Elphaba had neglected the fact that the hardwood floor was of a pale blond color. So pale, in fact, that a single strand of black hair would stand out like a green girl in the middle of Shiz.

"Well, well, well, what have we here?" Morrible drawled. Elphaba barely had time to panic before pain took over as Morrible's claw-like hands wove their way into two fistfuls of raven hair and pulled Elphaba out from beneath the four-poster bed, thin coffee-spun thread supporting all one-hundred and twenty pounds of her. Elphaba made a sound of intense shock and pain, a sound between a gasp and a shriek. Morrible, who in heels had a good four and a half inches on the girl, especially if her pompadour counted, lifted her by the hair to dangle at eyes level in front of her for a moment before laughing and throwing her to the ground.

"Strip-" Morrible said to the guards, watching with amused eyes as Elphaba simultaneously struggled to her feet and into a corner protectively and opened her mouth, "-the bed," she finished.

Not more than three blankets' removal revealed Fiyero, about halfway _in flagrante delicti._ Elphaba buried her face in her hands. _Did I not tell him to HIDE?_

She could not let this happen. She could not let them take him, hurt him, when all he had done was love her when no one else would.

No. He would not be the next person to fall victim to her affections. Her mother, her sister, Dr. Dillamond. Everyone she cared about was ripped away, shattered into pieces, as if she were some kind of destructive, inadvertent King Midas.

It would _not _happen again.

"He has nothing to do with it," Elphaba burst out vehemently as the guards stared, confused, at their captain. She looked Morrible directly in the eyes, her gaze clear and unflinching, her voice steel. "He's a hostage. He didn't help me. I captured him."


	11. Noble Fools

**A/N: Formatting got screwed up, so I took it down to fix it, and here it is, fixed...My school's not out yet, in fact exams don't start until Tuesday, so NO BERATING ME for my continuously sparing updates! Given that I could, basically, not show up for any of my Tuesday finals and nothing much would happen to my grade (though I of course won't do that, and am actually studying like a fiend for two of them- not Health, because I protest Health's actually counting for anything because it's moronic- because I have what has been referred to as "a Calvinist work ethic on steroids," though I'm not actually Calvinist, just Lutheran, and I've had arguments with my history teachers on Calvinism…but anyways…that would be why I'm actually trying hard on these finals. I suppose, actually, that one of them might garner me an A in the class if I do exceptionally well on it…but it's the second and third days of finals that I'm really concerned over, since I have borderline A's and B's in all of them that could shift which would really not be very nice at all, if they went down…and you all don't really care all that much, so I'm just going to stop talking now…**  
**Disclaimer: Not mine**  
"What?" Fiyero struggled, unhindered by the rather perplexed guards, to his feet. "I am _n-" _Elphaba kicked him soundly in the shin and bestowed a deathly glare upon him.

"You _are a hostage_," she growled. "I know you're disappointed you couldn't manage to capture me or even _escape _me, but take some consolation from the fact that, after all, I am a _witch_." He stared at her blankly. She amazed and frightened him with this ability to become so terrifying, so cold, within a mere instant.

"But I-" he tried again.

"Oh, _shut up_." She turned to Morrible, her eyes hard. "I cast a spell on him." Her voice didn't tremble. "But I weary of it now. It shall wear off soon enough." She threw Fiyero a look that sent relief coursing through his veins like a powerful drug. Her eyes were her own again, warm, panicked, loving. _I would never_, she begged him silently to understand. He nodded at her quickly, smiled briefly and solemnly. She breathed once more.

"Why would you tell me this? Why so keen to spare him?" Morrible demanded. Elphaba turned away from him and tossed her head defiantly.

"I told you, I weary of him. Besides, _I _don't _lie _to condemn the _innocent_," she added, the core of her shining through in her blazing eyes as she gave voice at last to something true.  
…  
He would _not _let her do this. He had been charged with guarding her in the stagecoach back to the palace, and she was refusing to speak to him, or even so much as look at him. Morrible and another guard sat across from them, and whenever he would protest, she would remind them that he was 'under a spell.'

She was bound, but she held her head unrelentingly high, staring out the window without expression. Frustration burst out of him.

"I'm so _damn tired _of your self-immolating nobility!" he yelled at her. She turned to him, blinking, her eyes blank.

"I haven't the slightest idea of what you are talking about, _sir_," she said, a mocking lilt tingeing the title. Morrible watched with interest. Fiyero turned to the older woman in desperation.

"She's lying. I am _not _under a spell! I rescued her from the torture chamber when she was first caught- bleeding all over the floor, barely able to stand- she was in no condition to do magic, or she wouldn't have let herself get whipped in the first place!"

Elphaba glared at him ferociously. "Shut up!" she screamed. "Don't _do _this!"

"How can I _not _do this, Elphaba? You're not the only one with such foolhardy integrity. I love you." He turned to Morrible, he put his fist through the window of the coach. They were driving through the middle of the city, with dozens of people milling about, some now staring at the coach and its suddenly broken window. "_I love Elphaba Thropp_!" he declared at the top of his lungs. People on the street stared. "_I love the Wicked Witch!_" he yelled, even louder. He pulled his head back inside the carriage and put his arms around her and kissed her deeply.

"You fool," she said when he broke away. "Oh, you fool." He realized with no small shock that she was nearly crying. The guard looked to be on the verge of mental and physical collapse. Beside him, Morrible was grinning wickedly.

"Well, well, well," she said. "I never would have thought it. The Witch and the Captain. The _brightest_ girl at school," she said cruelly, "And the idiotic stud."

"I'm not an idiot anymore," said Fiyero. He remembered a line from one of Elphaba's books. "It is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done before." Elphaba sniggered lightly.

Morrible laughed openly. "So you think now," she said. "I suppose she's rubbed off on you. Noble fools, the both of you. What are principles when you're nothing but ashes?" Elphaba gave her a murderous look.

"What is life when you've ashes for a heart?" she countered. Morrible laughed.

"You don't even believe in the soul, do you?" she asked her. Elphaba lifted her chin. "Then what on earth are all your good deeds for?" The guard gave Morrible a shocked look and had the appearance of one about to piss himself. Elphaba fixed the older woman with a level glare, devoid of hatred.

"Perhaps I've changed," she said slowly. "Perhaps I do believe in the soul. I don't know. I only know what I believe is right, and that I must do as my conscience dictates." She sat even straighter, her eyes glowing. "It is _that- _not the _lack of fur_, not even _speech_, but _that_- that separates human from beast!" She yelled loud enough for the curious hordes gathering around the coach to hear. "And it is _you_, you and the Wizard, who are the _beasts_!"

The coach stopped. Morrible growled and yanked Elphaba into the bright sunlight. As the guard came out of his stupor and pushed Fiyero out, blinking, behind her, he heard the crowd gasp at the sight of the Witch.

"You cannot humiliate me," Elphaba told Morrible. She turned to the crowd. "Mock me as you have always done, imprison me, torture me, condemn me as evil, _kill _me-" She laughed suddenly, genuinely, not a cackle, and turned her face to the sun. "It doesn't matter! I have done what was right. Look at yourselves, just look- look at your leaders, look at your blind obedience to them, look at the evidence against me- and you'll know the truth! You condone genocide by your silence," she told them. She looked out at them, their faces of stone, and fire breathed from her eyes. "I will gladly die," she said, "I will go happily to my death knowing that I have _never_, not _once_, sacrificed what was right for my own benefit. I have _never _given in to _them!_" Morrible slapped her across the face. Elphaba spat at her. She was shoved, and Fiyero behind her, through the large doors of the castle, and into prison.


	12. Why?

**A/N: Sorry- but it's like school never ended. Driver's Ed at eight in the morning, French for an hour and a half, and a shitload of summer reading. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine**

Elphaba's body sang with pain. Burnt and bleeding, whipped and beaten, a bruise her body entire, she was deposited, near inanimate, back into the dank cell she shared with Fiyero. More than likely, she knew, this rather large mercy was because they were being spied upon, but she did not care. All that mattered was _him_, warm and solid and steady, unbeaten as yet. The guards were still tentative, uncertain. And he had not, technically, been discharged from the Guard. So, technically, he was their superior. So, technically and otherwise, they were _confused_.

But Elphaba.

They pushed her inside; she wavered painfully on her own two feet before he came to her and caught her as she fell. She smiled up at him and it tore his heart. Her lips were bleeding, her cheek an awful dark purple color, the worst of stormclouds. But her smile was of true, weary triumph.

"I didn't-" she managed to say before she collapsed entirely into his arms and he scooped her up close to him and carried her to the small pallet in the corner and lowered her, ever so gently, and stroked her hair, and determined that he would move heaven and earth to keep them from so much as touching her ever again.

…

The perpetual half-light of the prison had darkened to near pitch-black when Elphaba awoke. She blinked twice, never having had the best eyesight and missing her spectacles. She identified the mound beside her as a sleeping Fiyero, calculated where she was in relation to the door. She glanced around the cell and nearly fell over in panic as she discerned a familiar silhouette in the shadows. Morrible sat in the opposite corner, her leer a sharp gleaming knife in the dark. Elphaba worked to keep her features neutral despite the forgiving cover of darkness.

"What do you want?" she demanded fiercely, leaping to her feet and screwing up her face against the pain of her bruised…everything.

"I see you haven't come to your senses," said Morrible, in the tone of a schoolmistress, lightly reprimanding. Elphaba shuddered inwardly.

"I am in perfect control of my senses, thank you," she responded coldly.

Morrible snorted.

"Ah, yes," she murmured, "Your little display in the square, all honor and integrity and foolish youthful idealism. Too bad the citizens of Oz weren't convinced." Elphaba tossed her head defiantly.

"If just one of them so much as questions your propaganda, even so much as silently, for just an instant, then…" Elphaba grinned wildly. "Then I win."

"You _win_?" Morrible snorted in disgust. "You're locked in prison, you'll be beaten, tortured-" she leered- "by _various _means-" Elphaba felt vomit rise in her throat, but she pushed it down and lifted her chin- "and, dearie, the only thing you could possibly 'win' is an execution."

Elphaba shook her head slowly. "You're wrong," she said, and the subject was clearly closed. She cocked her head and looked at Morrible with an air of supernatural serenity. Unbidden, images of Lurlina, of the girl Ozma, appeared in Morrible's head.

"Why do you hate me?" Elphaba asked levelly. "I know it's your job to spread propaganda, but even before that, you disliked me. And now- it's more than that. You _loathe_ me. Why?"

Morrible stared at her. "_Why_? What does it matter why? It only matters that you're locked up here and I can order whatever I want done to you."

"No," Elphaba said. "It does matter why. I want to know. That, I deserve." She fixed Morrible with her unnerving, feline gaze. "I want to know," she repeated. Morrible did not know what to tell her. She had not calculated for this. She had never thought of this, herself. Hatred was natural. But the way she hated Elphaba- the girl was right. That was _personal_.

"There must be something," Elphaba said, almost softly. Morrible began to see exactly how good the girl must be at her work in the Resistance.

"You want to know?" she cackled, the way Elphaba was supposed to. "Fine. You have been _nothing _but an ungrateful wretch since the moment you showed up at Shiz! Insisting on your own way, late to class, _demanding _I put that useless twit Miss _Upland_ in my seminar- and _then_, after _all _I did for you, running off and making a fool of me? And stealing the Grimmerie?" Morrible's eyes were hard as dark marbles. "You have the power, and you don't even _want _it. You read that book _effortlessly_. And you have no regard for _me_. Your _teacher_!"

Elphaba's face had lost all traces of serenity and holiness. She was on her feet, eyes blazing, every inch a Wicked Witch.

"_Teacher_? You were supposed to guide me, to _help_ me, to show me how to analyze the world, to think for myself. But you-_you_- deliberately _tricked _me into doing wrong, into hurting _innocent creatures_ for _your own gain!_" Elphaba screamed. "You lied to me, you misled me. All without a care for anyone but yourself! And then- you _lied _about me. To _everyone_, to my _best friend._ You ruined my life, and all so you could be the Wizard's _goddamned PRESS SECRETARY!_" Elphaba spat, forgetting the sleeping Fiyero. He woke, slowly, and watched the tableau before him with slitted eyes. Morrible slapped Elphaba across the face, hard, and Fiyero leapt to his feet to catch the unsteady young woman. She whimpered quietly, so that only he could hear, as her bruised ribs fell into him. Fiyero stared at his former headmistress, nearly understanding the hate that flowed like blood through her veins.

"Get out," he hissed.

She sniffed. "I was already going," she said pettishly, and disappeared.


	13. Trust

**A/N: I'm **_**so **_**sorry for taking so long to update. Short, I know…**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

Immediately after Morrible left, Elphaba pulled away, a look of fierce anger illuminating her features with stark intensity.

"What?" Fiyero asked, looking at her uneasily. "What are you going to do?"

Ignoring him, she hurried to the door and knelt, her dark skirts pooling around her, her face pressed up against the keyhole, as she began to murmur strange words in a foreign tongue. Fiyero could feel the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand up as the air grew colder and tingled with frosty enchantment. Then, as quickly as it had come, the magical mood dispersed into ordinariness.

"Damn it," said Elphaba from the door. "God, Lurline, Kumbricia all damn it to hell."

"What's wrong?"

"I haven't- wait," she muttered, more to herself than to him, "That's it, that's what the spell's done," and inexplicably, she pulled a pin from her hair, sending it flying in a midnight flood over her shoulders. She murmured more of the same strange words over the pin before bending it carefully and inserting it into the lock, twisting and listening intently. "There," she said at last, as the door clicked. She leaned her head gently against the door, now unlocked, and closed her eyes.

"What're you-" Fiyero asked, but she vehemently hushed him with a taut wave of her hand.

"Wait," she murmured quietly, "Wait…" She looked up suddenly, smiling faintly. "It's clear," she said.

They ran, her steps nearly silent despite her boots, so skilled was she at balancing her weight, his more clunking but the same as those of the guards on other floors that they could hear walking above them. When they reached what Elphaba said was ground level, she paused briefly, then darted down a short hallway, examined the windows there for a moment, and kicked one in without hesitation. The window, Fiyero saw, faced a deserted alley, rather than a populated street. Elphaba leapt from it easily, glaring fiercely at him until he followed. The moment his feet touched the ground, she began to run again, using alleyways and side streets, until she had put what she believed be enough distance between them and the prison. She leaned against the wall and worked to keep the pain from her face.

"We can't go to the apartment. Your old barracks, if they're still vacant, are out of the question." He knew, suddenly, what she was going to propose before she spoke.

"We can't-"

"We must. We have to go to Glinda's."

"Elphaba, no," Fiyero pleaded, not wanting to voice his suspicions of Glinda. "There has to be somewhere else we can-"

"No," Elphaba answered firmly, and he reached for her hands, drawing back in shock when he touched them. They were burning hot.

**…**

Glinda opened the door to her spacious bedroom and nearly screamed. Her best friend lay sprawled on the bed, and her ex-fiance was kneeling on the floor beside her.

"Glinda!" Fiyero cried, looking up.

"_What _are you _doing _here?"

"We were arrested," Fiyero said coldly, "As if you didn't know that. She was _tortured, _Glinda, she barely managed to get us up here before she passed out. _Look _at her!" Fiyero demanded. He was up and across the room in three strides, dragging her to Elphaba's side. The green woman's face was bruised, and dried blood reddened her lips. The purple-tinged imprint of a large, male hand was evident around her throat. Glinda turned away, her hand to her mouth, horrified.

"She wanted to come here because she _trusts _you, Glinda. She _believes _in you," Fiyero spat. "I hope your little revenge was _satisfying!_"

"What- what are you implying?" Glinda asked, her eyes not leaving her friend's inert form.

"I'm not _implying _anything. I'm _saying _that I think you betrayed us. I think you turned us in."


	14. Friends

**A/N: Aaaah! My computer just blasted the opening of "No One Mourns the Wicked" almost as loud as if I were actually in the theater, all close to the stage…-falls into happy daydream. Puts head on desk. Is poked with pen.- Damn it. Not much actually **_**happens**_** in this chapter, I'm sorry to tell you. **

**Disclaimer: Ce n'est pas a moi. Is that right? Boo, I don't even know. I can't think in English. Shut up, leave me alone. My Irish book won't teach me any swear words. That line up there isn't Irish, it's French, by the way. Whatever. **

Glinda stared at him, her perfectly made up mouth hanging open.

"_Fiyero_," she said, her voice level and firm for what seemed like the first time since he had met her. "Do you really believe that?"

He glared at her, refusing to weaken. Channeling Elphaba. "Yes." Except, he knew, feeling guilty as Glinda's eyes filled with tears that she, resolute, refused to let fall, Elphaba would not have done that, unless she were absolutely sure, and he wasn't. It was just as likely- probably more likely- that Avaric had done it. Glinda would only do such a thing if she were mad off her head, and maybe not even then. Avaric would do it if he was _mildly bored_. Because Elphaba was right. She wasn't cruel, and she wouldn't say something like that to her friend, unwarranted.

"Did you?" Fiyero asked. Glinda pouted.

"Of course not."

"By accident?"

"No!" Glinda thought for a moment. A very _long _moment. "No."

"_Avaric_," growled Fiyero.

"Oh!" said Glinda, biting her lip. "I might have sort of kind of accidentally maybe-ish let a little tiny hint of a hint of an itsy-bitsy microscopic something slip for about half a second when I was talking to him the other day," she murmured in a rush. "But nothing that would've let him know where you were!"

"He already knew. He just had to be sure," Fiyero said quietly. "But you didn't intend to," he added quickly to forestall a fit of Galinda sobs and indignity.

On the bed, Elphaba coughed slightly and tried to sit up, resulting in both Fiyero and Glinda tripping comically over each other in their eagerness to get over to the bed and keep Elphaba from getting up.

"Hi, Glinda," Elphaba said hoarsely.

"Elphie! Oh, Elphie," Glinda cried, grabbing her prostrate friend's midsection and pulling her into a hug until Elphaba's coughing shook the shorter woman too violently for her to hold on any longer. "Tea!" Glinda exclaimed suddenly, getting up and running out of the room abruptly. Fiyero and Elphaba stared after her for a moment, speechless.

"Does she ever _not_ move?" Elphaba wanted to know, laying her head back against the pillow.

"I don't think so," said Fiyero. He climbed nimbly into the bed beside her, allowing her to lean against him. He tried, badly, not to show his shock at how hot her skin was.

"What's the matter?" she asked. "Oh, you're cold!"

"No, Elphaba," he said, but she was racked by a fit of coughing.

"What the hell is wrong with me?" she asked irritably, her voice thick with illness and exhaustion.

"You have a fever. It's perfectly natural, after what's happened to you. Sssh," he added, forcing her to lay back down.

"I have teeeea and sooooooup!" Glinda cried happily, carrying a tray into the room. "What are you doing in there, Fiyero, nothing dirty I hope! Oh, the servants are confused!" she announced brightly, the former remark gaining a weak laugh from Elphaba. Glinda's grin widened. "Here," she said happily. "Minestrone. I have the second best cook in the whole city here, you know. The best being at the Palace, of course. You're quite lucky I wasn't staying in my rooms there tonight, you know."

"I've never known you to miss a Thursday night pampering session," Elphaba said raspily. "I was sure you'd want to be in your own house for that."

Glinda laughed, but it sounded a bit forced. "You never really knew _Glinda_, though," she said.

"No," Elphaba corrected. "_I _always knew Glinda. It was just that no one else could see her. Even you, sometimes." Glinda set the tray down and ran over to hug her friend again, ignoring Fiyero's presence. He could only sit and wonder at the friendship displayed raw before him.


	15. Goodbye

Elphaba was a fast healer, because she refused to admit any lingering effects of illness. The second day, she was out of bed despite Fiyero's and Glinda's coaxing, admonitions, and threats. Within a week she was dressed and pacing, chafing at the limits of the room.

Elphaba made a wonderful fugitive and an awful patient, which to her felt much akin to being a prisoner. Glinda's library was extraordinarily lacking and the Good Witch herself was much absent, so Elphaba resorted to juvenile amusements. Disembodied voices floating down the stairs and frightening the servants into dropping the laundry. The meat flying about haranguing the cook for its murder. That sort of thing, until one maid had gone storming out in tears and Glinda had been forced to rectify the situation.

"I'm sorry," said Elphaba contritely. "I didn't mean for it even to go that far. I'd go down and apologize if I could…"

"Oh God. Why don't you just. Give the poor girl a heart attack and finish her off," Glinda said meanly.

"Thanks a lot." Elphaba tried to say it lightly, but her eyes were wounded.

"She was just bored, Glinda," Fiyero said placatingly.

"Well, she can't just torture people like that!"

"_Torture_?" Elphaba laughed, low and long and fearsome. "you don't know the meaning of the word, Glinda. Or perhaps you do. Perhaps you orchestrate it? Or just organize the little cell block seating charts, the schedules, so like a wedding, hmm?"

"Stop it, Elphaba!"

"No. I won't." Elphaba's face was sharp, her nose a bayonet, fierce and frightening. "No one else will stop it, I have to. I won't spare your feelings, Glin, you've not spared mine."

Glinda looked as if the floodgates were about to burst and engulf them all in a storm of tears.

"you really _are_ what they say, aren't you?" she demanded, and Elphaba's mouth dropped wide open, her eyes flashing from wounded to hard and cold.

"maybe I am. It's all I'm allowed to be," she said quietly, and opened the window. "Come, Fiyero, I can see we're not wanted here."

"Oh, Elphie, wait," Glinda cried. "I didn't mean it."

"Words are words, and what's said is said," Elphaba made her mouth a thin line. "Goodbye, Glinda." She looked poised to climb out the window. Fiyero ran over and caught her about the waist.

"Put me down, you great idiot."

"No. you can't go out there. you've just started walking in a straight line."

"That's a lie."

"No it isn't. you and Glinda don't have to _talk _to each other. Just lie here, ok? For Lurline's sake."

"Well, I shan't speak to her," Elphaba declared unequivocally. "That was uncalled for and just cruel and I won't tolerate it. I'm the Wicked Witch of the West," she added rather immaturely, sticking her long nose in the air with a rather comical effect that made Fiyero stifle a laugh.

"Shut up," said Elphaba. "We're bloody leaving tomorrow, and I don't care what anyone says."

Fiyero opened his mouth to argue, but she had turned over and fallen asleep.

…

"I'm _sorry_, Elphie," Glinda said pleadingly.

"I know, but it's not because of that," Elphaba answered. "We can't stay here. We'll be found and you'll be arrested, too." Elphaba smiled at her friend. "I can't say I think you'd do well in those circumstances, dear." Glinda tried to return Elphaba's grin, but hers was weak and tear-filled. She embraced the green woman. "_Write_ to me," she said forcefully.

"I will," Elphaba promised. She pulled out of Glinda's embrace and pulled a veil over her face. "Goodbye," she whispered, and climbed up into the coach Glinda had engaged.


	16. Fire

It was awful. Fiyero was accustomed to much drier air, and he couldn't say he found the shift pleasant. Also, he had always been rather attached to the ground beneath his feet, and this- this was not ground. Elphaba plunged vigorously through the muck, clearly not having any problem adjusting to the all around _sogginess _of Quadling Country. For all he knew, the perverse woman probably liked it. Given that the pervasive moisture was utterly in opposition to certain rumors believed about her by the general populace, he imagined she'd like it for the sole fact that it allowed her further defiance of everything everyone ever thought. That seemed to be her goal, that and thwarting the laws of physics.

"you're thinking," Elphaba said, only a gentle edge of mockery shading her voice.

"A rare event," he answered her lightly. She gave him a pensive expression.

"Not so," she declared simply. "What about?"

"Why…_here_?" he asked.

"It's not Munchkinland and it's not the Vinkus."

"What's that got to do with it?"

She gave him the look that told him he was being extraordinarily dim.

"That's where we're _from_, correct?"

"yes…"

"And where do you think Morrible and the Wizard are going to look for us, hmm? Certainly not in your castle, oh, never there, not after they first found us in your apartment."

"Well, they shouldn't look for us in Munchkinland. Your father-"

"He, and anyone else there, would turn us in."

"And they won't here?" Fiyero asked, genuinely curious.

"No one here has any great love for the Wizard," she said without elaborating. "This is a great hideout for members of the Resistance who need to lay low, and for the Animals we've saved." She glanced at the bemused expression on his face. "They have to go somewhere," she said. "And yes, that was my main occupation. Nothing so sinister as you were thinking."

"How would you know what I was thinking?"

She grinned at him and leaned over to kiss his cheek. "It's not difficult."

"Is that an insult?"

She smiled again and leapt ahead of him, cutting easily through the muck with her long strides.

…

It wasn't long before they reached a small village, one that was apparently a main sanctuary for Ozian Animals, for many of them knew Elphaba and all the town's inhabitants, Animals and Quadlings alike, had heard of her. Fiyero was simultaneously shocked and delighted to see her received as a proper heroine, greeting her Animal friends with embraces and warm smiles and commingling easily with the Quadlings, whose language, Elphaba being Elphaba, she was practically fluent in. It was likely the most useless old Ozian language, so of course she had chosen it rather than the more common Gillikinese or her native Munchkinlander speech. But it served her well here, and by the time she'd met all the townspeople they were throwing a party in her honor.

_So this is who she is, when no one seems to see her skin_, he thought, and he wondered at who she could have been if born to a different father in a different era. If born here, and given confidence to add to her natural store. She returned to him smiling, her cheeks flushed from her proximity to the fire (the Quadling and Animal children had all demanded stories, and their elders had listened with equal eagerness) and demanded that he dance with her. She pulled him up and began waltzing with surprising grace, given her display at the Ozdust the day he'd met her, and soon a few of the Quadlings had pulled out instruments that looked like fiddles and began to play a quick, lively tune that sang in both Fiyero's and Elphaba's veins. She watched the Quadlings around them dance a traditional dance, far wilder than anything either Ozian's school lessons had given them to believe took place in the South, and soon Elphaba's feet were turning in rapid percussive patterns matching their hosts'. Fiyero grew exhausted after one clumsy round and slipped quietly to the fringes to watch his shy, lovely Shiz girl practically hover off the dance floor, surrounded by laughing admirers.

He was glad they had come.


	17. Restless

A/N: So terribly sorry about the loooong hiatus

**A/N: So terribly sorry about the loooong hiatus. Junior year is like hell with homework. And summer isn't much better, especially with college admissions counselors crushing your hopes and dreams at camp.**

It wasn't two weeks before Elphaba was tearing at her own skin, needing to be out.

"you've done your part," Fiyero said. Everyone told her the same, the Animals she'd rescued heaping praise, the Resistance members in hiding telling her she deserved a rest more than any, and she faced the greatest risk going back. To everyone's surprise, Elphaba seemed to listen, but they all noticed her stories growing less animated, her rambles through the marshes growing fewer, and her eyes going more distant by the day.

She was half-reading, listlessly draped over the bed, glancing occasionally at the same line of text over and over again. Fiyero sat across the room, watching the languid motion of her eyes, so unlike her usual intense focus.

"Elphaba," he said, suddenly, his voice too strident in the still, damp air of the room.

She looked up, the slightest echo of startled in her eyes.

"Are you all right?"

"Why?"

"you aren't yourself." He found it best to be blunt, as she was.

"Then who am I?" It was an old piece of cleverness, and the smirk teasing the corners of her mouth held only a trace of her usual lively mockery.

"Elphaba, be serious."

"About what?"

"your life, love." The adjective, little used lately, slipped easily from his lips and stopped her levity.

"What about it? Reading? Telling little entertaining stories? Making love, wondrous as it may be? What is there in that to be _serious_ about?" Her voice went up into ringing clarity and dropped to a hush. "Tell me, Fiyero, because for the life of me I can't find anything in myself that means…anything."

He stared at her, and thought of how _much_ she was, and how he had no words for her.

"you…mean- Elphaba, you've meant so much to so many," he said, faltering. "All the Animals here- you've saved lives, and generation upon generation after this depend on what you've done."

"What I've _done_. I'm not _doing _ it anymore. I'm not _doing_ anything."

"you want to go back," he said, not a question.

"I need to go back," she said.

"Please, Elphaba," he said.

"It's not over," she answered, and he knew she would go.

She stayed for another week, and every moment was tense with the waiting. He wanted to go with her, but he hadn't asked, assuming she would take him.

He was wrong. The first morning of the fourth week, he woke and felt for her beside him, but his plumbing fingers found only cold, empty air.


	18. Elphaba Escapes and Fiyero Follows

She ran. She ran as if the Gale Force were pursuing her, and not just- possibly- Fiyero. She wasn't entirely sure why she had left without even attempting to convince him to accompany her, but she was certain he would have tried to detain her, and she couldn't take inaction for another second. This, after all, was what she was good at, what she knew: running, solo, planning on her feet. Always moving, always restless, because moving and restlessness kept her alive. She hadn't lost the old habit of it, she was glad to discover, running still felt good in her legs and her heart.

But no one could run forever, and that included Elphaba. Eventually, winded, she came to a stop and delved into the woods at the roadside, where she searched out a small, soft patch of grassy earth beside a fallen tree. Satisfied that she was far enough away from the road to avoid discovery, she put her head down on her satchel, covered herself with her cloak, and fell asleep.

…

Fiyero knew she had to be headed for the Emerald City. He planned his route carefully, for he was now a fugitive too, only much less distinct than she, especially if they were separate. But they couldn't remain separate for long. He knew what she didn't- he knew just how far the Gale Force would go to capture the girl who had flouted their authority before the entire city.

So perhaps they hadn't told the public. This was the slender hope that flitted through Fiyero's heart; that they would be so ashamed by the escape that only the Gale Force's inner circle would have been informed- and thus, that no one would be looking out for the Witch other than a select few. A very frightening select few, but a select few Elphaba could likely elude. She had managed to elude the entire country for months, after all. She didn't leave much of a trail, either. Fiyero supposed the former was a consequence, in part, of the latter. But he knew the general line in which she was headed, and he was well-provisioned. He had slept the whole previous night, whereas she had woken before dawn to run away. In any case, he was confident that if he found her before she reached the city, he could convince her to let him stay at her side. But once she reached the Emerald City, once she fell back in among her associates in revolution- he knew an impenetrable wall of silence would rise up around her and remain unbroken unless she was caught again.

And this time, there would be no one to save her.

…

Elphaba slept, and Fiyero walked. She had run, but he had time and energy on his side. He could have caught her- would have, if she had been on the road. As it was, he missed her hidden camp entirely and kept walking, eventually making camp himself some three miles up the road from where she slept…

… And where she woke, slowly and with an inevitable, heavy sense of _wrong _on her skin. _Shit_. She opened her eyes, slow and careful, and found herself staring into the double barrel of a shotgun.

…

Damn, she was good at this. Half a night's sleep and he was up again, walking, and no sign of her. She must have caught sight or scent or psychic knowledge of him and hidden herself, or perhaps she was flying, and had arrived at the gates of the City already. Perhaps this was futile, and he was meant to sit in stifling Quadling Country like a housewife and wait for her. Well, if she wouldn't countenance that (and he knew she wouldn't) than neither would he; he would find her, he would join her, and show her he was worthy as well. So he walked faster, head up, determined; he would show her and he would show his parents how dedicated he could be, how he could, too, have a cause.

If only he knew he was walking farther from her and her distress with each satisfied, confident step.


	19. Shotguns and Pistols

Elphaba blinked twice, slowly, hoping the shape before her eyes would dissipate with her grogginess. But she knew it wouldn't. She'd never been one for waking up disoriented; she nearly always knew where she was even before waking entirely. So there it was, the plain fact of the gun before her face.

"Well, gentlemen," she said, believing the gun to be the property of the Gale Force and unable to see beyond it, so close was it to her face, "whatever have I done to merit the inestimable pleasure of your company?"

Sometimes mere sarcasm passed for frighteningly witchy. But the effect was somewhat diluted when a single old man lowered the gun slightly.

"There's just the one of me," he said. "And gentlemanly is somethin' I've never been accused of, but if I'm not mistaken ye'r the Wicked Witch what's sleeping in my woods."

"Oh, that," Elphaba said, waving a green hand dismissively. "Were I what they say, would I really have allowed you to point that thing at me for so long? I'd have gone poof with a snap of my fingers and been off in the mountain caves eating babies or something equally ridiculous."

Now it was the elderly man's turn to blink credulously. "Y' eat babies?"

"No, of course I don't eat babies, you great idiot, that's why I said I _would_ if I _were_ such a wicked witch, implying, of course, that I am _not_."

"Wait…so ye're not the Witch?"

Elphaba gave him one of her _looks_. "No," she said slowly, thinking perhaps she could get out of this through sheer exploitation of stupidity, "No, I am not. I am going to go and _catch _ the baby-eating witch, such as there is. So if you would like to help, you could do so by providing me with a meal and that shotgun."

…

Fiyero realized about three miles later that it was entirely possible that Elphaba had gone off the road and decided to sleep.

"Shit," he said decisively, and sat down to wait and see if Elphaba did come down the road.

…

"I dunno," said the old man suspiciously. "Ye're green."

"No, I'm not," said Elphaba, deciding to play this game all or nothing. "I'm sitting in the forest. I _appear_ to be green, but really, I'm not."

"What color be ye, then?" the man asked.

"Purple," Elphaba pronounced, poker-faced. "The same color as _you_, you moron."

"I'm purple?"

_Good God_. "Look, all right, I have to go catch the baby-eating witch. Shall you help me save the babies by giving me the shotgun, or shall I be on my way?"

"I can't be giving ye the shotgun, missy, but I've a pistol up in the house I can spare," said the old man. "Provided ye return it once ye've killed the baby-eating witch, an' all."

"Of course," said Elphaba. "Shall I come with you to get it?"

"Aye, and would ye like a cup of tea wi' it?"

"That would be lovely, thank you."

Only how she was going to explain away her continued verdigris once she was in the house, she'd not the slightest idea.

…

Fiyero realized, after what he thought was hours into his vigil but what was in reality about twenty minutes, that perhaps Elphaba, being a wanted fugitive and a magnet for trouble, might have found some of that latter and be in need of assistance. So he picked himself up, rather relieved (he had never had a very long attention span) and set off the way he had come, scanning the edges of the woods for traces of Elphaba. He tended to forget the extent of her training in the Resistance approximately ninety percent of the time.

…

The bemused old man didn't seem to notice that his strange guest remained green once out of the forest light and in his old shack, perhaps because the shack was too dark and the man himself too myopic to allow for it. Elphaba accepted his proffered cup of tea and drank warily, more out of fear of grime than her customary leeriness of poison or drugs that would render her unconscious. She took a drink.

"This is…really good. Thank you," she said, somewhat surprised.

"It's na' a problem, ma'am," the man said. "I don't imagine ye get much hospitality round here, so 'ts the least I can do."

Elphaba gave him a curious look as he began unloading the pistol and wrapping it and the bullets in a piece of grimy homespun. "And why wouldn't I get much hospitality?" she asked.

He handed her the pistol and bullets. "Oh, ye know. People round here en't so fond of…baby-eatin' witch catchers." She could have sworn that he winked at her as she finished her tea.

Fiyero began to whistle once he had gone a few miles in the direction of Quadling Country, and he almost died when he found a pistol in _his _face.

"Shut the hell up," said a very familiar voice. "You're annoying the ears off of every creature within two miles."

"Elphaba!" said Fiyero, and she lowered the pistol and grinned.


	20. Practical Magic

A/N: Uhhhhh…hi? I am so, so sorry…if any of you are still there…turns out, senior year requires that whole applying-to-college thing…whoops. Well, I just read _A Lion Among Men_ and got inspired again, so…here we are.

Disclaimer: So completely and totally not mine.

All right, so Fiyero was kind of pissed to be walking back the same route along which they had come just a few weeks before. And his legs hurt. And he was hungry. And tired. And he had to pee.

"So go," said Elphaba. "You are a male, Fiyero, it's not as if it's all that difficult for you."

He gaped. "Are you reading my mind?"

She laughed. "Just your face. You look as though you've just eaten a lemon, and since you clearly haven't…"

"Fine." Fiyero grumped. "Don't read my mind."

"What mind?" Elphaba asked, laughingly.

"You're a funny one."

"I've been told." She turned her back with exaggerated courtesy to allow him to utilize the welcoming facilities of a nearby bush. "If you're tired, we can stop," she said more seriously after a moment of silence broken only by the stream of Fiyero's urine.

"No, let's keep going."

"It's still a few days till the City. Unless," Elphaba said, and he could tell even facing away from her that she had a wry grin on her face, "you want to fly?"

"You haven't a broom," he said.

She scanned the road around them. "You're quite right," she said cheerfully, and promptly detached a long branch from a tree with more force than he had thought it was possible to possess in such a small frame.

"You're _certain_ you know the spell?" he asked.

She made a _moue _of false hurt feelings, a face he thought he recognized as a borrowed mockery of one of Glinda's, charming rather than suffocating when tainted so heavily with sarcasm.

"You don't trust me?" she said, and muttered a few words in a language he didn't know.

The outline of a small door, the size of a kitchen cabinet, fluoresced suddenly in the air. He stumbled backward in shock and nearly fell on his rear. Elphaba laughed and opened the door.

"It's my favorite spell," she said. "So wonderfully simple." She perched on her toes, the supple leather of her boots bending with the movement, and snatched the Grimmerie out of her magic closet.

Fiyero caught a glimpse of what else she had stowed away in there: a spare black dress, the glint of a knife, some blankets, a box of matches, a few sticks of dry tinder. Only Elphaba, given a magical storage place, would be so damn practical about it. But then, too, only Elphaba, given relatively limitless magical power, would be so damn practical about it.

Elphaba magicked the stick and replaced the Grimmerie.

"Well," she said, "do you want to fly, then?"

He did not, decidedly did not, but they did. The City was a half day and a night from where they stood, as the witch flies, resting for a day in between. They walked off the side of the road until twilight fell, accompanied by cloudy shadows, and Elphaba deemed it safe enough to launch them. They flew into the darkening sky, above the trees, the sun glowing scarlet on their left. _Home_, thought Fiyero, but without any longing to be there.

The stars emerged, and the night grew indigo, the stars cold metallic daggers against the fabric of the sky. The air around them was cold as well, and Fiyero was glad of the excuse to wrap himself closer around Elphaba, who he knew ran colder than most people and who he could feel trying not to shiver, trying to keep up her noble bravery, like always.

"It's not a sin to be cold," he said close to her ear, where she could hear him despite the rushing wind.

"I'm not any colder than you are," she said. Even though she was green, he thought he saw her lips turning a white-grey color that might be blue in a peach-toned person.

"Yes, you are," he told her. "Your lips are going blue."

She laughed, the sound of it lost to the wind but the expression unmistakable.

"An improvement," she said, "I tried going blue a few times as a child and was slapped for the trouble."

"You aren't funny," he said. "Why don't you land and get out your magic blanket?"

"The blanket isn't magic," she said, "just the cupboard it's in. And it won't help, have you not noticed the wind?"

He shouldn't have been able to hear her, he realized. Then he realized he wasn't, physically; she was in his head. Oddly enough, he didn't mind.

…

She didn't stop until the sky pinked and she could feel the cool golden light streaming at her from the direction of her hated homeland. She was not weaker than he, and she could withstand far more than cold. He didn't like to think of what she could withstand, she knew, and she knew it was a mark of his affection, but she didn't like to be underestimated. Even when it helped her in the end, and it wouldn't now, it made her blood burn.

Which, yes, would be a help in this cold.

They landed in a small hollowing-out of the trees, far from the road and away from any farms or cabins she'd noticed flying over, and they made camp. She took out her "magic blankets" and made a little nest for them in the shade, spreading one over the ground, one over their bodies, and the edge of one slightly over their faces.

"To keep the sun from waking us," she said, and thought: _to keep us from being recognized_. They were too close to the City for safety, and he was wanted now, too. Her fault, which seemed to be the general state of affairs for any problem anyone in the bloody country ever encountered.

…

Fiyero was glad it was a cold morning, selfishly; it meant as soon as she fell asleep, her body unconsciously conformed to his for warmth, even though he was reasonably sure that consciously she was still a bit mad about the whole cold thing. She likely thought it implied he thought she was weak, and she probably thought he thought it was because she was a woman. Which was ridiculous because he knew she could kill him or any other man (or woman) a dozen ways without magick or weaponry; and with her magick she could kill him with a thought. With a penknife, she could kill a man another hundred or so ways. So couldn't she let him help her, in his small ways? God knew he hadn't much to offer her in a fight, save for another set of hands and feet for holding off any mobs that happened upon them.

He couldn't expect her to know that was all he was trying to do; she wouldn't read his mind unasked, only send him her thoughts. He should tell her, he thought, in the mor- the evening.

Was this trip ever going to mess with his sleeping patterns. Ah, well, he sighed, and fell asleep.


	21. Sun Stars

**A/N: This is a bit of a fluff chapter, I'm afraid...I found what I'd originally written for the last chapter, and put some of it in here, and then decided to add to it. The myth is the Irish Moytura story, of Balor and his Formorians and Nuada and the Tuatha de Danaan. The only thing I did was change Lugh's name to Fiyero. The version I drew from was The Names Upon the Harp, by Marie Heaney. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

When he woke up, it was dark, much darker than he had expected. Elphaba had lit a fire and sat before it with the Grimmerie spread over her lap. He stood up, wrapping himself in a blanket against the chill, and came up behind her. The tome was open to dozens of carefully sketched illustrations of mushrooms, and Elphaba had a pile of the living fungi beside her. She was carefully comparing the mushrooms to each sketch, and tossing those that passed muster into a pan she had levitating over the fire.

"Evening, _mo chroi_," Elphaba said.

"Hey…why are there pictures of edible mushrooms in there?" he asked, gesturing toward the Grimmerie.

Elphaba laughed with her head thrown back, her long hair loose and tumbling. "Oh, Fiyero," she said, "I'm checking to be sure it's _not_ in here."

"Oh."

He sat beside her, and she offered him one of the cooked mushrooms, steam pouring off it into the night.

"Did your parents ever tell you there's a constellation named Fiyero?" she asked, and he shook his head in the negative. She leaned over to him, and he could feel her smile against his neck.

"I can't _see _you," she reminded him.

"Read my mind."

"I thought you didn't like it when I did that."

"No, Elphie-Fae, they never told me."

"Oh, good," she said, and pointed. "There, see? A circle of stars, with arms coming out in spirals."

Fiyero followed her finger's trail in the flickering firelight, and slowly a shape converged out of the mass of silver sparks decorating the night sky.

"It looks like a drawing of the sun," he said.

"Exactly." There was pleasure in her voice, that he had listened and seen.

"There's a story," she added, "but I don't want to tell it, now."

"That's not fair," he told her.

"I'll tell it while we're flying," she said, and sprang up from the cold ground. "We should start, anyhow."

…

"Tell me the story," Fiyero said almost the moment they were off the ground. He felt more than heard Elphaba sigh into him, and knew she had acquiesced.

_All right_, she said in his head. _Here: _

_Once upon a time, there were two fierce tribes, and one was oppressing the other. The leader of the dominant tribe was a ferocious man, malformed and terrif_y_ing, with one enormous e_y_e, which, opened, could kill an_y_one who looked at it. _

"Seriously?"

_No, _y_ou idiot, it's a stor_y_. Be quiet_.

"Fine."

_Thank _y_ou_. _An_y_how, it had been prophesied that this man's grandson would kill him. He had onl_y _one daughter, so he decided to lock her up in a tower guarded b_y _women so she would never meet a man, and thus he would never have a grandson, and never be killed b_y _him. Clearl_y, _this was a bad idea, as an_y_one who reads fair_y_tales knows that girls locked up in towers _always _fall in love. And so did this man's daughter. _

_Her father had tricked a neighboring man's brother into giving him the man's cow, and so that man enlisted the help of a faerie woman in exacting revenge. The faerie disguised him as a woman, and the_y _went to his daughter's tower, where the_y _told her guardians the_y _were fugitives and in great danger. The_y _were allowed inside, and while the women were distracted with the faerie, the man cast off his disguise and went up to the daughter's chambers. Seeing each other, the_y _recognized that the_y _had dreamed of each other before and fell in love immediatel_y, _and then…well, That bit's a stor_y y_ou're familiar with, dear. The girl was glad to find herself pregnant with a reminder of the man she loved, and when she gave birth to triplets, two bo_y_s and a girl, she called them Ceithlinn, after her mother; Balor, after her father, and Fi_y_ero_. _When her father found out about the children, he threw them into the ocean, where Ceithlinn and Balor drowned, but where the faerie woman who had brought the children's father to the girl in the tower found and rescued Fi_y_ero, bringing him to his father._

_He grew up in a king's household, learning skills like fighting, poetr_y_, and the games of the court, and when he was read_y_, he went to the palace of the high king of the land, demanding entrance. _

_"What can _y_ou_ _do?" he was asked, and he told them: recite poetr_y_, compose ballads, fight the strongest of men with an_y_ weapon, pla_y _an_y _logic game and win- _

_"But we alread_y _have men who can do all those things," he was told. _

_"_y_es," said Fi_y_ero, "but have _y_ou an_y_ who can do _all _of them?" _

_And the_y _did not. So he became part of the high king's castle. Within minutes of his joining the household, a troop of his grandfather's men came in, and they disrespected the king, because there was nothing anyone could do. But Fiyero was angry and he rushed at them and killed most of them, telling those he left alive to go back to his grandfather and tell them what he had done. _

_When his grandfather was told of what had happened, he fell into the grip of a rage great enough to tear the plates of the earth asunder. He gathered together an enormous army and set out for the palace where Fiyero lived. _

_Fiyero and his king had a great plan for the battle, and had healers, druids, and poets with pens so sharp as to be swordlike on their side. At first, they were able to use their magic and their talents to hold out in battle, but soon the fight descended into hellish chaos. Finally, Balor killed Fiyero's king, and Fiyero, in a sorrowful rage as powerful as his grandfather's, began to hurl verbal abuse upon the older man, who demanded his large eyelid be raised so he could look upon- and thus kill- the man who was so abusing him. He was obeyed, and many on the battlefield cowered to escape his murderous stare, but Fiyero took his slingshot and hurled a stone straight into his grandfather's eye, sending the eye through the back of his head and into the ranks of his soldiers, many of whom it killed, lending Fiyero and his men an easy victory. _

_Fiyero, who because of his many talents became known in the country of the gods as the sun god, also fathered the land's greatest hero. _

"There," Elphaba said aloud. "Pleased?"

"I still don't understand how he's the sun god," Fiyero said.

"It's a myth, it isn't supposed to make sense."

"How do you know that story, Elphie?" he asked, after a moment.

"It's a Quadling story," she said. "I read it when I was a little girl."

"Of course you did."

She grinned. "And what's wrong with that?"

"Nothing, my darling bookish witch."

Rose began to rise to the surface of her green cheeks. "Hah."

"Accept a compliment, for once, huh, Elphie?"

"So, what do you intend on doing once we get to the city, Fiyero?"

She couldn't see his face, but she could sense the surprised look on it.

"Whatever you want me to do to help."


	22. So You Want a Revolution

**A/N: *peeks out from behind tree* Uh, hi, guys. *walks out slowly* So, uh, it's been awhile, huh? *kicks dirt* Well…yeaaaah. So, AP tests are almost over. And so I wrote something. Finally? *sheepish grin* Review? **

**Disclaimer: Not mine**

They made good time getting to the city. They landed in the midst of a tepid, late twilight; the finish of a day whose heat had sent the City's denizens to toss in bed beneath sweaty sheets long before their usual bedtimes.

Elphaba brought them down in an alley and rummaged in her bag for cotton gloves and a gauzy black scarf.

"You don't keep those in your magic compartment?" Fiyero asked, gently mocking.

A glare. "No. I need them too often and too immediately."

"Oh."

Elphaba opened her magic compartment then, with a smirk on her face that quickly dissolved as she checked cautiously over her shoulder at the mouth of the alley, and shoved in her broom with a fast, neat motion. She closed the compartment again and strode forward, leading them from that alley to another, and through a maze of byways and side streets, none of which Fiyero had ever seen before.

"Uh, Elphie?" he asked finally. "Where are we going?

"Headquarters," said Elphaba without losing a step, and Fiyero almost rolled his eyes at the militant melodrama of the word before he realized what she meant.

"You mean the Re-"

"Ssh! _Yes_."

She was quiet for the rest of the walk, focused on navigating her old labyrinthine commute, and he wisely followed suit, until she stopped short before an unassuming storefront, where he voiced his doubts.

"Elphie-Fae, didn't you say they're no better than the Wizard? They _hurt_ you. Are you sure they'll help?"

"Oh, they'll help, _mon soleil_," she said. "Or they'll be the ones in need of assistance."

Fiyero could tell by the white-hot copper of her eyes that she was serious.

"Oh," he said again, not asking how she planned on taking down Lurline-knew-how-many armed men with the same or more training than she had.

Elphaba rapped a sharp, complex pattern on the door. "It's Fae," she said. "Let me the bloody hell in or I'll kick the damn door down."

"Lur_lina_, Fae," a man said, opening the door. "Anyone'd think you'd the Gale Force at your heels."

"Who's to say I don't?" she said, stepping in and motioning cryptically to or at Fiyero, who wasn't sure if she was informing the man of his former employment or gesturing at him to come in. He chose the latter and the man chose the former.

"Ah, yes, your pet turncoat," he said, as Fiyero stepped across the threshold, glowering. "Dragon's not going to like this, you know," he cautioned Elphaba.

"Frankly I don't give a flying fuck what Dragon likes or does not like," Elphaba spat.

The man gave a low whistle. "He won't like that either."

"Go and _get _him or I'll kick you somewhere _you _won't like."

The man, unsurprisingly, obeyed.

"It's a much different approach than Glinda's, but effective," Fiyero mused.

"Hmm?"

"Your way of controlling men."

"And what makes you think it's just men? You aren't so special as you like to think. I'm this way with everyone."

"No, you aren't."

"Fine, except you, but either you're a man or I've been hallucinating vividly for quite a while and should probably be concerned."

"Ha," said Fiyero drily as a black-clad man approached. "I-"

"_Un moment, mon cher_," Elphaba said in quick Old Gillikinese that he could barely follow, brief as it was. She turned to the new arrival.

"Fae," he said. "Glad to see you've rejoined us."

"Not quite," Elphaba said. "I've come to a realization."

"Oh?" he raised his eyebrows, a condescension Elphaba did not miss.

"Yes, _oh_. This organization is hardly better than the Wizard's. Do _not_," she held up a hand, "Do _not _interrupt me. This organization _claims_ to support equality, but it's run by Gillikinese human males like yourself- no women, no Animals, no Munchkins or Vinkuns or Quadlings-"

"Fae-"

"I'M NOT FINISHED. _This _is how it's going to work. You are _going _to start training everyone qualified the way you train your leaders. _Everyone_. And that operation you've planned, for Lurlinemas Eve? I want in."

"Or else?"

"I do what I have to do. You know my value as a scare tactic, even if you don't appreciate my value as an operative. I can clear this city in under ten minutes simply by flying over and howling a few idle threats, and rest assured if I do there won't be a single Pigeon left here, let alone the Wizard or any legitimate target. What good are bombs and guns on an empty Palace- you _were_ only going to bomb the Palace, right? Not the streets, surely?"

Dragon's face was ashen; Elphaba's was flushed, and her eyes had the hallucinatory luster of fever.

"Glinda," Fiyero whispered.

Elphaba whipped her head around to look at him, the ends of her lovely hair hitting Dragon in the face.

"_Je le sais__,_" she hissed. _"Je l'ai souvenu. Cet un jeudi soir_."

_Thursday night_, Fiyero thought, then remembered. _Oh_. "I never miss a Thursday night pampering session at my own house," Glinda had said.

"What was that?" Dragon asked, eyes flicking sharply between them.

"Communication. You might try it some time, it's really quite useful," Elphaba tossed off, stepping further into the room.

"Wait!" Dragon pulled her aside, grasping her wrist and getting shoved into a wall for his pains.

"I would _not_," Elphaba hissed in his face, "try that again."

"You can't start an internecine revolution in the middle of an external one," Dragon pleaded.

Elphaba stepped back and took her hand off his throat. She grinned ferally. "Fucking watch me," she said.


End file.
